Stop All IT Projects!

Again, I was chided for saying there are no Information Technology projects. This time, the excuse was that the company built software. I countered my antagonist by asking if the same group that built their software also maintained the account system, workstations, email, and network. "No, that is a separate group." He was missing that his company's production group was not IT. Information Technology is the support group... and yes, they should not be doing anything that fails to directly affect getting product out the door or reducing costs. Every project's goal must be to deliver to the operational needs of the company—selling product—not to the whims and desires of the IT group. If a project fails to address the needs of the customer (directly or indirectly), then it should never see a penny of funding. This seems such an elementary concept, but it is routinely violated by techno-bigots trying to implement the latest toy or tool.

The Almighty Customer

Companies make money by producing a product or service. Duh. Whether the organization is a multinational corporation or a small non-profit, improving how they function requires initiatives. These projects may work directly on a production line's capabilities, implementing new state-of-the-art materials, indirectly affecting the product by enhancing the infrastructure to reduce internal costs or increase capabilities, or any number of other topics—as long as they benefit the business. Regardless, a business case must be present that improves the top line or bottom line. Adding IT resources to a project does not make it an IT project.

Imagine to upgrade software project (service patches, database optimization, break/fix are not projects). If the business is not fully engaged with the change, trouble is on the horizon. For example, the IT group has a strong business case to upgrade from Office 2003 (losing support) to Office 2010 or Office 365, but the business has to assess the impact to their productivity. Initially, it will plummet. Over time it will recover and may actually get better (I have yet to see any productivity increase from this specific upgrade). The business has little desire for the pain. Hence, an information technology group supplies the resources, the guidance on what needs to be done, and the business owns the project of implementing it based on their perceived value. This job is selling IT's roadmap. If the business does not upgrade and they are caught not having support it is their problem, not IT's.

Connecting to the Business

To help, CIOs need to get their group closer to the business. There are a number of techniques for them to do this. It requires confident and mature teams—not in the individual-contributors, but in IT leadership—from the CIO down to the first level management. The CIO needs to look at him or herself as a facilitator. It needs to be someone thinking less about his or her fiefdom and more about providing resources to the business. The resources are in three areas:

People capable of turning business initiatives into reality. The classical approach of housing IT's delivery resources away from the business will save on moving costs and make it easier for functional managers, but it will destroy the teams ability to understand what the customer needs (not what they want, but what they need). Embed IT resources in project teams and collocate them with the business team. This improves project delivery and customer relations by merging the two teams into one. Implementing a distributed team does, however, require strong IT leadership. Directing and coordinating a dispersed group of technical people and ensuring they get the proper care and feeding to grow and flourish is hard work. The benefit is that resources resident with the business have a thorough understanding of the business's issues and propose better solutions.

Utilities that allow the business to its job. The operative word is "utilities." Servers, telephony, networks, and COTS applications as we all know are about as unique to our companies as electricity. The goal should be to find companies that provide these utilities and hire them.

Visionaries creating a cost-effective technology roadmap. Provide the architects and governance to enable the business to adapt rapidly to the future. In a highly distributed organization, where your teams report to business managers rather than in to an IT group, aligning them to a common roadmap is difficult. The architects must be more than technical wizards; they need the ability to sell their ideas to the IT executives, the business executives, and a distributed implementation team.

Distributing Your Team

Stop all IT projects and make them business projects. Their existence simply perpetuates the old myths of business silos. Technology is ubiquitous in the business and so should the IT group to support it. IT is no longer a mysterious and arcane subject practiced in computer rooms. It can be boiled down to simple tools for manipulating data for the end user to get the answer they need. Distributing the technical resources to help the business do its job is the next logical step.

Related items

Tired of doing the same thing and expecting the different results? The goal of a properly run retrospective is to do more of the good things and fewer of the bad. Even well run projects have lessons that we can learn. Preforming a retrospective on a project allows you to capture the highs and lows of a project and integrate that information into a library for others to use.

Unfortunately, you have been there: projects, programs, and sometimes entire initiatives fail. As opposed to the normal first reaction of finding someone to blame, what is needed is immediate action. Troubles in delivery are only symptoms and not the source of issue. Projects put organizations under stress. eCameron uses a fail-safe recovery plan for helping you turn around your failing projects. We carry out a fact-finding audit and root-cause analysis to create an achievable corrective action plan that helps you get your project on a new track and meet the value requirements of your stakeholders.

For any strategic initiative, it is critical that everyone associated with the project be focused on the the projects minimal viable goals. This requires strong team interactions and open and realistic communications from the leadership to the individual contributors. We ensure that the project is completed; however, to avoid further failures the organization often needs repair, too. We have a track record of successfully completing the most complex of projects while making improvements to the organization to prevent failures from reoccurring.

A project's destiny is set very early, often at the inception phase long before the project even starts. The definition and setup of project governance to ensure your projects are properly defined and monitored throughout the project lifecycle is critical.

Having the appropriate level of governance and oversight is always a challenge. Unfortunately previous project performance has a huge influence on level and degree of governance. The more failures the more governance; the more governance the more bureaucracy and the lower the agility. eCameron has extensive experience with all levels of projects, sizes of company, scope of project, and culture of the company. We can help you balance the governance with your company's culture and its people.

A vision is just a dream without a strategy to implement it. The act of strategic planning helps define what you plan to do, your target customers, and where you’re going. It takes account of the opportunities, threats, bumps, and risks that may be encountered in your journey to turn your vision into value. The result is a set of clearly defined strategic goals, an action plan to achieve them, and a risk mitigation plan. For start-ups, a highly-adaptive plan may cover one to two years, while for mature companies it may span three to five years is more appropriate. This five- to ten-page document, however, must be clear, concise, and easy to understand by your stakeholders and shareholders.

Whether an investor, a member of your senior staff, or an employee, everyone should be able to identify how the strategy relates to him or her. Aligning and prioritizing your initiatives, projects, finances, people, and other assets to the strategic goals is a critical next step in ensuring that your vision can be realized in the quickest and most profitable manner. Only through rigorous planning, alignment, and adoption will you achieve your goals.

eCameron the breadth and depth of experience with companies of all sizes, from start-ups to billion dollar corporations, and a wide range of industries to assist with building your strategy and maintaining alignment.

Plans are nothing without the ability to implement them. People are paramount. Ninety-eight percent of the people in a company are focused on running the daily sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, IT, product delivery, and so forth--in other words "their day job." They neither have the time and often do not have inclination to drive the implementation of a new plan. New plans require bringing in temporary staff and sometimes new full-time skills to ensure the new goals are met in a timely manner.

Second to people, the right level of process is needed; however, too many organizations rely on process as the Holy Grail. Process needs to provide structure without bureaucracy. It must be agile enough to enable a team to quickly deliver critical capabilities yet adaptable to the inevitable adjustments as the business climates change.

Finally, and only after people and process, the focus turns to technology. It is only a tool to make the right people and processes more effective and efficient.At eCameron, we live by the credo - people, process, and then technology all aligned to your strategy.